The Charter Change Consultative Committee said it did not recommend the opening of land ownership to foreigners to protect Philippine real estate from speculations.
“We opted not to liberalize land ownership. Our land is shrinking already. It’s getting to be a precious resource. If we open that up, a lot of foreign nationals with fat wallet who are not even investors but are mere speculators can raise land prices beyond what the locals can afford,” Charter Change subcommittee on economic reforms chairman Arthur Aguilar said in a forum Monday.
The sub-committee said foreigners would likely take advantage of the low real estate prices in the Philippines and then sell them a huge markup once land prices started to appreciate.
It made the recommendation as a part of the proposed shift to federalism.
The committee said that with the fast-rising Philippine population, there would be limited opportunities or none at all for those without existing properties.
“How can we do low-cost housing? How can we build medium-cost housing for our OFWs? Or even for our soldiers and teachers? This is what we want to prevent when we purposely decided to leave out land ownership among the list of what is called foreign investment negative list,” Aguilar said.
He said the same happened in Sydney, parts of Vancouver and parts of London when these places eased the rules on land ownership and speculators came in.
Aguilar said the Philippine government could instead allow foreign investors to enter lease arrangements of 50 years or maybe even more, which could actually be viewed as some sort of “perpetual lease”.
Under the Philippine Constitution, foreign ownership of land is generally limited to 40 percent.
The committee is also thinking of another way to relax the law by allowing foreign-owned companies to enter into 50 years of the land lease.
“We still have remaining three days of debate. We surely intend to have a tight measure on land ownership and other laws that will uphold Filipino welfare, in general,” Aguilar said.